“Unlike the Opposition, the Brumby Government invests in public transport.” (From The Age, a story about the myki people getting even more money for a crap job.)

Attention Brumby government! As a service to you, I am reprinting the definition of “invest”.

1. To commit (money or capital) in order to gain a financial return: invested their savings in stocks and bonds.
2. To spend or devote for future advantage or benefit: invested much time and energy in getting a good education.
3. To devote morally or psychologically, as to a purpose; commit: “Men of our generation are invested in what they do, women in what we are” (Shana Alexander).
4. To endow with authority or power.
5. To install in office with ceremony: invest a new emperor.
6. To endow with an enveloping or pervasive quality: “A charm invests a face/Imperfectly beheld” (Emily Dickinson).
7. To clothe; adorn.
8. To cover completely; envelop.
9. To surround with troops or ships; besiege.

Nowhere in there does it say anything about throwing good money after bad. There comes a point where someone needs to realise that they’re no longer investing in something – they’re throwing money down a pit. The quote, from the public transport minister who does not want to run a train system, tries to justify this foolish spending by calling it better than nothing. However, spending foolishly is no better than not spending at all.

(Aside: The real reason why there’s such a push behind this myki thing is that the company that supplies machines and parts for the current system is not supplying them anymore. For all the money spent on myki, we could have easily bought that company and told them to keep producing parts.)

Excellent beer selection. Lots of interesting beers on tap – some not available anywhere else. Even more beer available in stubbies. The wine selection was very small, but contained a well thought-out variety, all of suitable quality. The food was well above average; with my shredded duck being excellent. Prices were very fair.

The service, however, was lousy. If an establishment is unable to provide adequate table service, then just don’t do it. Don’t pretend that you’re able to, and do it poorly. We were ignored, insulted and ignored again. I might come back for a beer, but I certainly won’t be eating there again.

The discrepancy between the quality of food and service was so great that we decided not to tip the waitstaff, but rather hand the tip directly to the kitchen, along with a personal thanks for a good meal.

I’m normally not one to dance on the grave of someone who’s just lost their job, but this is different. The person responsible for Melbourne’s new public transport ticketing system being about $500m over budget and 3 years late has finally been sacked from his $500k/year job.

Took bloody well long enough.

Is it just me or does it seem downright criminal to take that amount of money for doing what amounts to nothing at all? He was Australia’s most highly-paid public servant, and he made a mockery of that term. He seemed to serve no one but himself. Someone’s got to get into that job and kick some arse.

Hire me! Here’s what I’d do:

• Find out why myki is taking so long. Tell everyone the truth. Balls out. Go for it.
• Based on these findings, cancel the whole works (or not).
• Look at spending the money on buying more parts for the existing system (or even buying the company that made them, and putting the parts back in production. I’m sure it can be had for less than a billion dollars…).
• Pressing to get a single authority over the public transport system, and diverting money into buying more trains, upgrading the signalling and building more train lines.
• Make it really inconvenient for people at the Ticketing Authority to drive to work. No more car allowances, no more free parking. Take public transport! Then force the other transport agencies to do the same, through making noise in the media.
• As a sign of good faith, I’d ask for much less than $500k/year. Half that! I’m generous; I’d do it for $250k.

We finally have what we should have: people using public transport. Excellent. Unfortunately, the infrastructure is woefully inadequate to handle all these people. Careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

Oh those nutty funsters at the Herald-Sun. Publishing a page that shouldn’t be published

Thanks to The Daily WTF for this gem.

TPG, probably the best-known, um, “budget” provider of Internet access in Australia, has released one of the coolest information design pieces I’ve seen in a long time. They’ve mapped out all of the telephone exchanges in the country on a Google Map (in itself a useful thing). They’ve overlayed that with the regions the the exchanges service (also quite useful). Then, as the coup de grâce, they’ve used actual data from their DSLAMs in each exchange to show the speeds that their customers in certain areas get.

I live about 5km away from the exchange I’m connected to. There are actually two other exchanges that are physically closer to my house! Turns out, for connection speed, I’m about average. I’m relieved to note that pretty much everyone else in my neighbourhood also gets lousy Internet access.

I’ve mentioned the public transport ticketing debacle here before. It’s now worse – or better, depending on how you look at it. The overpriced, late, broken new system is still overpriced, late and broken; but it looks like the current system is very close to being broken, too. It seems that we’re running out of spare parts for the ticket vending machines. We might get free public transport, whether they want to give it to us or not.

Here’s what I would do:

• Cancel myki – or at the very least, fire the company that’s supposed to be installing it. Don’t give them any more money, this is just throwing good money after bad.
• Find out why there are no more spare parts for the current system. Can we replicate them locally for less than $500 million dollars? I think so.
• Fire the project managers involved in myki. They obviously have no idea what they’re doing. Additionally, find out why the structure at the ticketing commission is so broken. Well-run organisations don’t let this kind of thing happen.

There’s something wrong with the way the whole system is set out, I think. Rather than trying to work together, all the different parts of the transport system are competing for money. The $500 million (or more) that’s going to ticketing is $500 million less for new trains, new signals, new tracks. That’s the problem right there.

Douglas Adams was credited with noticing that the phrase “as pretty as an airport” isn’t exactly in common parlance. Another Douglas noted that Vancouver’s airport is actually fairly pretty, for an airport. Douglas Coupland said that it’s a crash course in Vancouver style – lush greens, lots of glass, etc etc.

Well it’s no surprise that YVR has been voted among the world’s best airports – beating (among others) the far more melodiously-named Tullamarine in Melbourne.

So. We’re spending a billion dollars on a ticketing system that we don’t need, and which may be delayed for the third time.

We’re spending another half billion dollars on dredging the bay to accommodate more shipping containers that we have no infrastructure to support. This will likely result in spending ten billion dollars on a kinda-proposed tunnel under a couple of parks and a graveyard because of all the increased truck traffic. I’m not even considering the environmental impact of all this stuff. Total cost of useless projects? Eleven and a half billion dollars. Based on a population of about five million people, it’s $2300 per Victorian. That’s madness.

Note that most of the world’s biggest ports are moving out of the cities that gave birth to them. The land is worth too much to use for industrial purposes, and there’s no room for expansion.

Elect me! I will:

• Move the bloody port to Hastings, which has a naturally deep channel, decent rail connections, and room to expand. Fewer trucks on the roads in Melbn, hence no tunnel required.
• Cancel the damn ticketing system and spend that money on building more train lines to suburbs that don’t have them. Hell, for all that money, the trains could run for free: 170 million trips a year at $3.50/trip means that 11.5 billion dollars buys us free trains for nearly 20 years. There wouldn’t be any expansion happening, but I don’t see any happening right now anyway.

I don’t see how these two things could end up costing more than 11.5 billion dollars, really. We could build ourselves a very nice port and upgrade the train system quite well for $11,500,000,000. No tunnel required.

Doesn’t take much of a visionary to see that, Brumby.

I’m not a big fan of zoos, generally. Animals in captivity as entertainment isn’t something I agree with – especially when they’re not native. If the purpose is education, research and helping to save a species from extinction, then I’d be prepared to have a discussion, but with today’s education turning into “edutainment”, there’s certainly a lot of grey areas and slippery slopes.

Melbourne Zoo is horrible. I’ve been there once, and found it terribly depressing. Bored animals in concrete cages far too small for them. Vapid and generally devoid of any educational or research activity, it’s all about entertainment. It’s on my list of places I will never go again. There are two other zoos under the Zoos Victoria masthead – one in Werribee and the other in Healesville. I’ve never been to the Werribee one, but I was somewhat comfortable with the one in Healesville – it features native flora and fauna only, and (with a few exceptions) isn’t as brash and commercial as Melbourne Zoo. Recent events have changed my mind, however, and I’m no longer going to go to Healesville Sancturay, or recommend anyone else does either.

In the past week, the RSPCA and The Age have been very critical of Zoos Victoria for making some fairly poor decisions: repeatedly stabbing an elephant, allowing animals to escape by placing them in inappropriate enclosures, starving birds to death, and (bizarrely) bringing an echidna to an auto race.

This story takes the cake, however. Zoo chief’s home became menagerie for fund-raising event. What?!

Zoo sources said native animals that were removed from Melbourne Zoo and the Healesville Sanctuary — including a koala, parrots, snakes, lizards and a possum — were paraded around the party, a launch of a fund-raising foundation at Andrew Fairley’s Kooyong Road residence in November.

An orphaned short-beaked echidna is also believed to have been taken to the party. It died a month later after a senior keeper from Healesville Sanctuary took it to the V8 Supercars on Phillip Island.

This is madness, and totally irresponsible. Zoos Victoria ought to be ashamed of themselves.

The film critic Roger Ebert once said that a measure of a good film is the idea of wanting to have dinner with the characters in the film. If sitting around and having dinner would be an enjoyable thing, it’s more likely to be a good film. As flippant as that may be, there’s some truth to that, and I think it applies to other types of media as well: blogs, books, television.

I like watching Top Gear. Not really because of the car stuff, but because the hosts are so good. Using Ebert’s measurement, I’d love to have them over for dinner. Same thing with Spicks and Specks, Rockwiz and (the subject of this entry) Vasili’s Garden. I’m not really into gardening, but Vasili and his guests are always so entertaining that they end up rating quite well on Ebert’s eat-dinner-with-them scale.

I just read in The Age that Vasili will be moving back to his community-TV roots on Channel 31 from national broadcaster SBS. This means less fame and fortune, probably less money, and less access to high-end production facilities. There was a dispute about the style of the show: SBS wanted polish and glamour, and Vasili wanted to keep doing his successful home-movie style stuff. So the stubborn so-and-so ditched SBS and went back to Channel 31 where he (presumably) has more creative control over his show. I can’t wait to see him back on the air.